[ p. 136 ]
But when a dead man returns to friends in a dream he does not come as breath or heart or any of these soulforms, but as himself, individual and personal, as his friends know him, his wound still bleeding, his very clothes the same. Dead souls that are sacrificed at the grave to accompany a man beyond, as when a man’s wife is burned in India, buried alive in Polynesia, or decapitated and buried in Africa, go as complete personalities. The African’s chief priest dies with the king that he may still give his lord ghostly council. The dead things, arms, implements, toys, manikins, buried to rise again with their owner — all these rise as wholes not as place-souls. The thing dead is regarded, like the thing alive, as a complete whole. The Malay propitiates a piece of tin and begs its pardon fcr mining it on the same principle as that by which savages apologize to trees and animals for killing them. The Tibetan leaves the nugget and takes out the gold-dust because the nugget is the productive mother; he treats it as a person- Every person is remembered as a whole and remains a complete person after death. Hence the rule of the Fiji Islanders that leads them to bill their relatives and even themselves before the weakness of age shall make them permanently decrepit in the next life. Hence the Babylonians and other Semites must be buried properly or they suffer for it hereafter. In a word, the conception of personal totality as the endmdng part of map is far more cogent than that of soul of this, or that soul-place.
[ p. 137 ]
It is the more necessary to emphasize this point because, in his Volkerpsychologie, Wundt has disregarded it. According to Wundt, the savage identifies breath with •what Wundt calls the shadow-soul, which is a psyche opposed to the physical soul, and these are the oiy aspects of soul. But in fact the savage does not identify himselfwith either of these souls. Savages generally have several souls, but two stand out n^t prominently, the self and the double. There is a physical self and a spiritual self, as the Algonquius believed; this, too, is the belief of the Hfdatsas and of the Gold Coast Negroes and of the ancient Egyptians; Both the Negro and the Egyptian believe that there is a soul called Ka by the Egyptians and Kra by the Negroes (of the Tshi- and Ewe-speaking tribes). The Ka is the body-soul, yet not in such parts as we have been considering, which are, rather, vital- organs, but a double, acting like a genius as a guarding spirit, distinct from heart and shadow, though possibly at first confused with it, as a luminous glory, perhaps at one time imagined also under the names strength and form, but the Ka is especially distinguished from the. .spirit or breath-soul called Ba, a winged shape that ffies to the gods like the Greek flying psyche in bird-form. This soul eventually is reunited with all other soul-forms when the man after death is reconstructed, but the outstanding feature of the man’s personality is that of physical self and an ethereal self. The double of the man is material but his ethereal self (represented by the scarabaeus) is distinct from the body on which it rests.
So the African savage worships Ms Kra wMle he lives, witii birthday offerings; it is Ms genius. At death the Kra, leaving the body but still remaining near it for a time, is at last reincarnated, since it cannot be happy without a body, and until it finds a body it is hungry and evilly disposed; liable in the form of a Sisa to produce [ p. 138 ] illness or enter a wild beast If a man falls ill it is because some Kra has stolen into his body, while his own Kra is away, for in sleep a Kra may slip off and do some wearisome work, which explains why one is liable to wake up with a tired feeling. But when the Kra becomes a Sisa the real self becomes a ghost, or shadow-man.[1]
In dvUized life also we recognize the physical souL The corpse is conscious of the murderer; it is not safe to pass through a graveyard because, though the soul may be in heaven, the ghost is by the grave; there are two personalities, but one is shadowy and clammy and has a weak gibbering voice.[2] The Eoman Genius is a similar physical soul; it is indulged when one eats. lake the physical soul of the Greenlander and Amerind, the reincarnated soul of the Australian is physical, but at the same time the Australian has an immortal double, a nonincamate sotd. So the African, too, has a self distinct from the Kra, namely, the Srahman, which lingers a short time by the body and then goes to ghost-land, a place underground, where there are towns and occupations which are a counterpart of life on earth. This also is like the Egyptian life hereafter, only the African says sadly that “a corner of the world of the living is better than the whole of Srahmanadzi” (ghost-land), which is what the Greeks thought. But the Srahman is a guardian of the living, for whom it still cares, and prayers are addressed to it as a person. Now, in this case, although a shadow among shades, the departed ghost is the self that lived on earth, while the Kra is what wanders and may be stolen, so that one loses strength. But what is this other [ p. 139 ] than when we say, “the spirit iu« gone out of Mm,” “he has lost Ms spirit’[^xxxx] (he is a coward)! This is not the psyche, hht power, vitality.
The later belief eonfoses the two sonls. The psyche is confused with the shadow; the window is opened to let ont the ‘-‘souL” Ghosts, Wundt asserts, are from a combination of breath and shadow as souls. “His psyche hewailiag its fate, leaving manhood and youth, went from Ms limbs to Hades,” says Homer (H. 16, 856). TMs is not the “last breath” (as Wundt interprets it) but the image wMch represents the man in 'Hades. The soul of one undergoing transnodgration is only the physical soul in savage belief. “The jaw-bone comes from the ancestor,” says the Negro, meaning from the reincarnated physical soul. The soul that flies out in breath as a winged creature is as primitive as tiie worm-soul which is supposed by Wundt to have suggested the physical souL Q^e African savage determines by a dying utterance that he will become a butterfly; just as an Egyptian decides by magical means to become incorporate in an animal. The soul may also ehtef plants and trees; a body buried at the foot of a tree enters it; a plant from a grave is the very person buried. The form changes but the soul abides.
African demonology shows that many of the spirits afflicting men are souls, while others are independent phenomenal spirits, personified diseases and such, of a malicious character. TMs is the case also with the maliMotw and disease-bringing devils of Babylonia, where ghosts and phenomenal spirits mingle together, as they do in the Hebrew ShebL It is impossible, in a sopHstieated community, always to say wMch is the original form. Hardaur, a disease-god of India, was apparently once a man; but whether Bhairava, “the horrible,” who is now a form of SMva, was also once a man (as some suppose) no one really knows.
[ p. 140 ]
In most of the superstitions concerning the safeguarding of oneself in respect of other-world beings there is - rather a belief in the physical soul than in animistic spirits. What is not physical does not trouble the survivors. But for this reason the other aspect is apt to be neglected in discussions of the soul, and it is an- error to lay the whole stress on “body-soul” and “breath-soul” and then, confusing breath-soul with the dream- and shadow-soul (as does Wundt), to interpret all soul as merely physical. For in this interpretation not only is the confounding of breath and shadow inadmissible, but, . what is far more important, the self itself is lost sight of altogether; and yet this self after all is the chief thing to the savage, as it is to every man in all stages of development. To the survivors liable to be plagued with trouble-bringing ghosts the physical is the chief thing that matters, for it is the only thing they fear. But the dead man belongs to another sphere in his self-soul. This is what goes to the Happy Land, however called, of savage and Hindu and Egyptian belief; a man’s spirit is his self as remembered on earth.
Thus memory leads to the conviction that man continues to live hereafter not only in physical hair and blood and breath, but in his complete personality. The soul of the dead is always individual, though the soul of the living is composite. The sad shades of Babylonian and Hebrew undergrounds are woeful beings but they are whole individuals. The spiritual side, even in civilized thought, must have some sort of a body and with the body is connected the personality. In China an attempt was made to divide the Yang and Yin elements in man into two souls, one heavenly, one earthly, but this was no general belief and even as speculation it lacked the foundation of popular distinction between these’ elements. The usual Chinese ghost is one that “comes back” to the body, but [ p. 141 ] a later word for spirit in general is also made to do duty for the soul as ethereal, represented by “breath” and “light.” So the soul lives in the grave, but in the case of noble beings is also represented as being in the sky. Similarly, the Amerind’s skull is the abode of his ghost while he is in the Happy Hunting Grounds as a complete spiritual being, but with a body, albeit the body differs from that of earth. Yet in every one of these cases the savage or the civilized man imagines himself, not only his breath or liver or other “soul,” as living in the nest life. He befieves that his own individuality will live as a complete personality even though it may lack strength and blood, even though a spirit of strength, like the Hebrew soul, has left it; his immediate mortality is not conceived as possible. Later he may die again and gradually fade out altogether; he does not worry about what will happen in the remote future, but for the immediate future he is convinced that he, his ego, will be alive. Now what to a savage is his ego except his person as he know^s itf Obviously the whole theory of a double soul elsewhere; as it eertaiidy is in China, is a later philosophic or religious refinement of a more simple ego and the dual soul is either a superimposed belief, in which the grave-ego is left to one side and a new spiritual ego is made to take its place, or, as among savages, one part of the dual nature is conceived as adventitious, not vital to the ego, such as the shadow or genius. To each in his own generation he will himself live hereafter, or in other words his soul, the real sotd, is just himself. So the Micronesian, who is more advanced than the Australian and may in some regards be compared with the Amerind, holds that he has a shadowy person, his likeness, image, called IJnu or Ata-na. As an Ata-mauri, “living man,” one’s spirit may wander at night and be visible; it may remain on earth, maliciously inclined, but is now only a Natamate, “dead man,” [ p. 142 ] whereas the man Mmself or self-soul goes a long way to find life or a second death in the next world. Here we have shadow, ghost, and self, and obviously it is the self that counts; the other parts or souls are important only to the living men who see spirits or are tormented by these byproducts of individuality.
Civilized peoples explain that the self remains in the next life in a shattered condition; a certain weakness must be conceded; the breath of Yahweh is withdrawn; but -apart from that element of vigor the man himself lives in Sheol. At an earlier date he lived in the grave or stiU earlier at the hearth of Ms own house. It is indisputable that the soul has changed thus its habitation, home, grave, unaerground world, being the progressive series among the Babyicnians and Egyptians, and heaven being added as a fourth advance by the Chinese, Hindus, and others, e.g., the Amerinds. It is in this advance and connected with it that the soul is dislocated, so to speak. As soon as heaven is regarded as its home all the old habitations become insupportable. But they survive in a persistent tradition. Moreover, it is quite possible that the great honor paid to nobility, chieftain, king, sometimes priest, led to their being sublimated as superior beings and associated with celestials, sons of the Sun, etc., so that the first heavenly home and consequently heavenly soul was theirs, later universalized and assumed by commoners. Thus in Egypt the king himself is practically identified with the Sun-god and later belief merely gave all men the same destination, as Osiris was the first to go West and then later all men went West after him as subsidiary Osirides. The double soul would thus be first a part of a man like a shadow or follower, which did not really count after death, and in nowise diminished the thought of the self as the real soul, and then it would be utilized as a means of explaining the double home, when [ p. 143 ] the idea of the home afar from the grave had come to perplex those who eoijild not renounce the idea that the soul lingered there.
All over the world, however difficult men find it to describe or imagine to themselves a personality devoid of breath and blood and strength, they yet believe that their self, as distinct from breath, blood, and strength, does continue to exist. The liver of the sacrificed pig in Borneo remains behind and returns the answer (by divination), but its self, as its soul, goes as messenger to the gods. A “breath of divinity” is breathed into a Polynesian baby when it is baptized, as the “breath of the Maniton” becomes the soul of the Fox Indian, incorporated into it at birth, but just as the shade in Sheol, who has aliSo lost the breath of Yahweh, still retains its personality, so these savage breath-souls, although divine, are not the real self of the savage but only that which invigorates and makes live on earth. All a man’s acts are expressions of his personality and as sach are psychic; his acts are his souls j the acting organ is a soul-place. In Vedic belief the eye of the dying goes to the sun, his breath to the wind, his thinking power is likewise dissipated, yet the man’s self is not destroyed. He himself goes to the Fathers, sits beneath the tree of heaven, enjoys sensuous dehghts. As the hero in Valhalla, the Amerind in the Happy Hxmting Ground, the Egyptian and Greek in Elysium, so he lives in complete enjoyment as a perfect individual. The spirits of good kings in China lived in heaven sixrroimded by their good ministers, still taking an interest in earthly affairs. The Egj-ptian, who had reduced his earlier original souls to the Ka and Ba, still retained his traditional belief and his “heart” was also regarded as a sensible entity which could stand forth and accuse him (if not magically suborned) on the day of judgment. But, as in India, it was also in Egypt the first cave to make the [ p. 144 ] man’s self whole again by various formulas which united his death-parted individuality. It seemed as if a shock had sprung them apart; he could he nothing without his seif, that self which represented his totality, his individual personality. So, in both countries, these parts were formally restored to Mm; until then he waited in an imperfect condition for the fulfilment of life and self.^ This ritual holds in solution all the earlier savage beliefs of different powers making a man, as so many “souls,” wMch nevertheless must be united after death in order to have the self -soul perfect. One may say that a savage has (or says he has) any number of souls, three; four, or tMrty, but at bottom the savage knows that when he is dead any one of these is only an item in Ms self and that self is Ms real soul, his self-conscious ego in bodily form. So the African Bantu says : “My body and soul are one; my soul is myself.”
Zoroastrian belief also contains a replica of savage ideas in modernized form. The soul is a spirit choosing good or ill, fighting during Hfe on the side of Ormuzd or Ahriman and after death crossing the Bridge of Judgment to its fate, as if it were one and indivisible. But it consists of several spiritual parts. First is the breath, anhu, then the self as embodiment of activities, daena, or conscious intelligence, baodhanh, with which the daena, is sometimes exchanged, then the will-soul, urvan, and lastly the genius or fravashi, the preexistent superior soul (the idea-soul in the rnind of Ormuzd). The urvan is responsible for acts done in life. The fravashi accompanies it after death and speaks for it as an advocate. The conscious [ p. 145 ] intelligence also accompanies the urvan. The body remains on earth, bnt these five : life, conscience, intellect, will, and the guardian genius, go to the spiritual world and the dead is met by his daena on the third day after death before the judge. The urvan is like the Egyptian Ba, though the winged soul is the fravashi and corresponding to the anhu or breath of life and strength (tevishi, strength, sometimes replaces it) is the Egyptian sekhem, or “power,” of the individual, also personified as an entity.[3]
Thus even in the rarified religious atmosphere of Zoroastrianism there remains the primitive analysis of man as consisting of body on the one hand and self on the other, that self being the vital power conjoined with will and intelligenee to make a whole man. But the intrusion of conscience (or, in more Buddhistic form, the deeds of a man as personified entity) and the idealization of the attendant genius or forefather as genius, in place of the bodily self, shows that the Zoroastrian view has advanced far beyond those of savage and Egyptian, as the judgment gives an ethical tinge that removes it from the Babylonian conception; for in Babylonian belief the only reason for one ghost differing from another in comfort or misery was because the body was or was not pi’operly cared for; there was no ethical judgment.
While the conception of daena is practically “self as the conscience,” the more literal interpretation (and one in accordance with native tradition) is that daena is a man’s self as expressed in his thoughts, -words, and deeds. When the daena appears before the dead man in the jitdgment it says “I am thy (good or evil) thoughts, words, [ p. 146 ] deeds.” A Buddhistic heresy of the third century B. 0. also taught that there was a survhdng “heart, or mind, or consciousness” after death.
The resurrection of the dead implies in Egyptian belief the revivification of the body, with the heart, intestines, lungs, and liver. The Zoroastrian believed that, the Saviour, the “Baiser of tliose having bones,” would eventually cause the body to be united with the soul, or, in the later view, that God would raise the dead from the material parts, the bones coming from the dust, the blood from water, the hair from trees, the vital life from fire. This, was the basis of the belief in resurrection and judgment at the last day, which entered Hebraic and Christian belief along with the conception of a demoniac power opposed to God and other angelic powers who acted as God ’s messengers and deputies. The idea of a new spiritual body is absent from Egyptian belief; one goes to sleep at death and is aroused by magical formulas. The mummy preserves the spirit. In the Osiris-cult a man is revived by the formulas used when Osiris was resurrected. The earlier Ea-cult (of the Sun-god) seems to have held that a king was transported directly to the sky as a complete individual; but as the Sun is a moral overseer the king must have had some ethical support for his exaltation. The body spiritual is so firmly entrenched in Hindu belief that the soul between transmigrations has to have a special “subtle body” while waiting to be reborn.
In the early belief of Buddhism, before the Lme of the heresy alluded to above, a desperate attempt was made to get rid of the idea of soul altogether. Buddha was perpetually ridiculing the Brahmanic belief in the “little man within.” There was, he said, no such other self inside of a man, no separate being “the size of a thumb” sitting in the heart and surviving hereafter. What alone surviyed was the confection of character made of thought [ p. 147 ] and feeling and act in a previous existence; especially the desire of a man, whieli would continue to burn till all fuel was gone. But it was impossible for long to keep up tMs dogmatic distinction between soul and “confection.” In the course of a few centuries some Bnddbists were adherents of the belief in the puggala as a real soul, while eventually the later Buddhist Church made no practical distinction at aU. The believing Buddhist went as a soul to Paradise, very much as a good Brahman goes to heaven. The Lord Buddha welcomes this persistent self exactly as if it were a soul. Even Buddha himself recognized a memory of the past as part of the confection and the “confection” suffered in heU for its sins, so that only a metaphysician could see why a confection was not a soi^ Buddha’s real animus in getting rid of soul -was directed against its immortality. As a divine immortal part of man it could not be destroyed, while the confection was supposed to pass out like a flame when desire died. Man could not get rid of an immortal entity, but he could annihilate by starvation the temporary product of desire, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Buddha’s “confection” was thus a substitute for soul; it was the self surviving but wi,tli no immortal essence td preserve it from extinction; the ghost of a soul, the shadow of an old belief, which could not be done away with but was desiccated and remained as a memorial of the fact that the last thing a man .will renounce is the belief in his own self as an entity surviving death. By a curious irony of fate it was Buddhism which, by instituting the reverent care of relics (this was not a Hindu custom), first introduced the worship of the relies and of the curative powers supposed to reside’ in them as well as the shrine to keep them, which eventually developed into the temple, so that Buddha himself as well as hie bones became the object of worship, though his’propags nda was especially directed against all [ p. 148 ] soul-powers and spiritual beings as objects of any regard.[4]
In religious philosophy, spirits are freed from material limitations. Thus, though weak, they may transcend space and time, etc. The aim of the Yogi is to acquire such spiritual powers even before death. But these vain imaginations need not detain us here.
The habitat of the surviving soul will be discussed under the subject of myths. Here a few words as to belief in the soul as implied by disposal of the dead. The earliest method was by exposure, the body being left to be devoured.[5] Even in late Buddhistic tales the cemetery is not a place of graves so much as a place where dead bodies are exposed. In Tibet, bodies are given to dogs and the Parsis still expose the dead to birds; in ancient Persia as in Greece they were left for birds or beasts. A dog’s muzzle put to a didng man must imply in Par si belief what is implied by the Hindu custom mentioned above, the dog takes the soul as psychopomp. Exposure in trees was practiced, by the Hindu Gonds and some Amerinds. Inhumation seems here and there to have been earlier than cremation, which may sometimes have been confined to superior people, but among Fuegians it is customary and [ p. 149 ] probably nowhere indicates greater “refinement,” as used to be taught. Cave-burial is common and in some cases leads to cave temples, but seposition has no other significance. Embalming was practiced in India and Siam as a temporary expedient before cremation, but mummification, practiced in Egypt and more crudely in Pern, implies a desire to keep the departed body as essential to the soul. Articles buried in prehistoric graves show a Neolithic belief in future life; but Zoroastrianism shows that even exposure may be united with such a belief. Hindus believe that the body and soul after death wdll be refined replicas of the present body and soul but recognizable to the living, as were the shades to Greek and Hebrew. The idea of a bodily resurrection seems to be implied by the care with which the Vedic people collected bones of the dead, but cremation did away with this belief and converted it into that of the “subtle body. ’” All of these peoples believed in a conscious existence after death, but the Greeks did not believe in a bodily resurrection. The Hebrews, when influenced by Zoroastrianism, believed finally in a national resurrection of the righteous, eventually of all people, though, at first they had no notion of any resurrection, being in this regard on the same plane as the Babylonians, whose idea was that a god might revivify those who were almost dead but not bring back the soul to a body from which it had really departed. In later Hebraic thought, conscious life after death and bodily resurrection were both denied by the Sadducees, but the Pharisees believed in a bodily resurrection on earth, [ p. 150 ] which was not taught by Christ or Paul, who interpreted resurrection in the sense of a higher spiritual body. Christ’s resurrection not only proved to Paul a life after death but gave the cause of others’ resurrection (Rom. 8 : 11). The early Christians, however, generally reverted to the Zoroastrian belief in a ^‘last day” judgment. These Christians had different views as to the soul. Origen regarded it platonically as a pure preexistent spirit (a view condemned by orthodoxy); but to most Christians it was expressly created for each individual. Tertullian thought it was propagated and so inherited sin. The view that the, individual human soul is part of the divine soul is clearly formulated by the Hindus and is implied by some Christian mystics; but the Christian Church holds in general that the soul is individual, not a part of the cosmic consciousness or God, and it ignores or denies altogether what might be regarded as the logical corollary of the soul’s immortality, namely, its preexistence, which is elsewhere assumed and regarded as the strongest argument for its immortality.
Ellis, op. cit., pp. 153 f. ↩︎
Compare the dead as the “weak” in Babylonia and their twittering voices. When the Great Turtle speaks through a wizard it is with a “puppy voice” (Parkman, Conspiracy of Pontiac, p. 452), or in Micronesia with a bird-voice or twitter called mitefutefu, which describes both the wizard’s voice and that of birds (cf. 1 Kings 19 : 12). ↩︎
The fravashi is described as a “well-winged bird.” So in India the Fathers appear in bird-form. For “winged soul” even in life, compare Apollonius, Argon., 4, 23, Bahylonian ghosts fly over the sea to the “distant land,” Aralu, and so assume bird-forms. ↩︎
The soul against which Buddha inveighed was always the individual soul. He does not seem to have known of the All-Soul nor of any theory of individual soul except the crude ‘thumbkin’ soul of the Brahman priest. ↩︎
Possibly cannibalism preceded exposure; it is sometimes practiced as a religious rite (the power of the dead passes into the eater), or as a mark of affection. A Sampan chief’s objection to Christianity was that if he adopted it he might not be eaten by his family but by worms. Some Africans hold that natural deformity persists after death but accidental mutilations are not inherited by the dead body. The body, as some savages say, does not age after death but (like the Hindu gods, who are all about thirty years old in appearance) is not subject to change; yet, as one African said, it probably grows old and dies again, but we know nothing about it and only when white people plague us with questions do w’e think about such things. ↩︎